The Backstory of the B2B Magazine Integrated Social Media Award Winner

Cisco was awarded the Integrated Social Media Marketing Award by B2B Magazine for the creative development and marketing of the Cisco myPlanNet game. Cisco is now in the running for the people’s choice award so please vote for us.

Case Study: Birth of and Key Takeaways from the Development of Cisco MyPlanNet

View more presentations from Petra Neiger.

I am fortunate enough to work with the mastermind behind this great work – Petra Neiger and was able to interview her for some behind-the-scenes info on what was involved to pull this off. Here’s the transcript:


First tell us a little bit about what myPlanNet is and what you were trying to do?

Cisco myPlanNet is a simulation “edugame” that puts the player in the shoes of a service provider president. You can experience life as a wireline carrier, cable or mobile operator, and pick a level of difficulty and the Internet era you want to start in. From there, your challenge is to manage your business, transform your community, and guide residential and business customers into the medianet era. As you go through the game, you will need to make decisions every step of the way and every decision you make will impact your balance sheet, operations, and customer satisfaction.

What was the objective you were trying to solve that led you to creating the MyPlanNet game?

The key words here are engaging, educational and fun. The idea was to connect with our customers and network aficionados in an interactive and fun way, and allow them to experience the effects that Cisco's broad portfolio has on people’s lives. This game helps people explore how the different pieces fit together and the role Cisco has played in the evolution of the Internet over the past 25 years.

I’ve taken a look at the game and played it, the engineering behind it looks pretty complex. What was the process to develop it?

It took us 13 months to develop. We were a small team who did this project on top of our day jobs. On a high level, the process included project scoping, game architecture design, content design and creation, graphics and UE design and creation, testing, legal clearances, database creation and integration, testing, web page development, testing, marketing asset development…and did I mention testing? We tested the game many times and at every juncture to make sure all the pieces work well together and I can’t emphasize how important testing is. The other thing I want to stress is the importance of project scoping. Do spend the time to make sure you have all the details and information outlined and how one thing will lead into another. The more planning you do upfront, the easier it will be to go through the project and it will also help you stay focused. Not to mention, it will help monitor how you’re doing on budget.

If you’re interested in the detailed steps of game development, please see the embedded slides embedded above or check out the presentation here.

Focusing on the social media aspects, what did you do to promote the game and what worked or didn’t work?

When we first introduced this game in October 2009, we coupled social media with traditional media, such as banners, emails, Cisco newsletters and trade show demos. Our social media efforts were additive. After about 6 or so weeks, we pulled back on traditional media and social media moved into the driver seat. From day one, social media marketing has been used to increase awareness, and drive game downloads and interaction. Our social media strategy follows a continuous learning model based on these pillars: listen, share, engage, integrate, measure/analyze, improve.

We used a variety of different tools:

1. The landing page contains web 2.0 components such as the bookmark and share widget and live feeds from the JIVE support page.
2. We are using JIVE for online game support.
3. We shared news, tidbits, assets, etc via blogs, tweets, Facebook cross links, ads, Facebook fan page, social bookmarking, video syndication, RSS and discussion forums
4. We have promoted myPlanNet either as a standalone item or as part of a bigger initiative, such as Cisco Learning Network/Network Academy, the US broadband stimulus program, Consumer Electronics (CES) trade show, or Cisco’s 25th anniversary.
5. We are engaging with users via feedback solicitation, offering discussion forums for people to interact with other players as well Cisco technology experts, and are actively updating our fan page with socially competitive mini-games and other information.
6. In addition to the Cisco accounts, our small team also used our own personal accounts and personal relationships to help get the word out.

What worked well, top of my head…:
1. The campaign was fully integrated between traditional and social media as well within social media. This means that we had “one voice” in all of our communication channels and our messages were consistent. We had a clear call to action and made our content available in a variety of different ways. This helped increase our chances of getting noticed.
2. Our efforts caught the press’ attention and generated several articles and blog posts. Not only did these articles help raise awareness of the game, but we were also able to leverage these third-party postings (e.g., retweet, social bookmark, etc) to further promote Cisco myPlanNet.
3. Our Facebook ad drove a lot of people to our Facebook fan page.
4. The reaction to the “socially competitive mini games” on Facebook has been very positive.
Where we were challenged:
1. The team that developed this game was small. The team who were responsible for promoting this game was much smaller. Resources were definitely a challenge. It’s not just about getting the message out but it’s also about monitoring the responses or posts that come in, and then addressing them as needed on an on-going basis.
2. The question of JIVE platform vs. Facebook fan page. We monitored both of them for the first few weeks to see how people were using each and what type of audiences went where. What we found was that JIVE was more suited for online technical help. Even today, people tend to read more on this page than post. On the other hand, our Facebook fans use the “Like” and “Comment” functions quite generously but do so on more casual, light-hearted topics. We also faced some platform challenges in the beginning but we worked around them.

If you’d like, take a look at some public slides from our detailed go-to-market communication plan.

What were the results of this campaign?

As of 04/13, we had over 115,000 hits to the game landing page, about 33,000 downloads, about 130 countries and over 2,500 institutions participating, and now have over 48,000 Facebook fans. While these numbers look good, it is also important to note the additional exposure Cisco myPlanNet has received in the form of blog and press mentions by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Broadband Census, Network World, and Computer World to name a few. Tom Grant, Ph.D., a Senior Analyst at Forrester did a podcast on Cisco myPlanNet with Stephen Liu, Chief Architect and me.

What lessons did you learn from this experience? Is there anything you would do different?

I would categorize my answers in 2 buckets: development-related and marketing-related learnings. My presentation on the “Birth and Key Takeaways from the Development of Cisco myPlanNet” highlights some things we’d like to do differently next time.
From a social media marketing perspective, I think these were the key takeaways:

1. Experiment, listen and choose your action: don’t be afraid to experiment with a post, mini game, etc., watch people’s reaction and address as or if needed.
2. Balance between engineered and organic content: have some seed content ready to go but at the same time, let the conversation naturally unfold. Monitor what people say but give them the freedom to comment. If your engineered topic doesn’t catch on, don’t force it.
3. Don’t take things personally: there will be people who may not like what you do and that’s ok. Don’t get on the defensive.
4. Social media doesn’t go away: once you’re in social media, you are in social media. So make sure that people on your team continue to monitor and stay engaged with your fans, discussion forum participants, etc. I think many organizations don’t quite realize how much time and effort it really takes to nurture your social media engagements. It’s more than writing a blog or sending a tweet. Often times, we are required to move from one thing to the next very quickly and get too busy to keep the “old” things moving along as we start working on the “new” ones. If social media is specific to a campaign and is not intended for on-going use, plan for an exit strategy at the beginning of your program.
5. Align your marketing objectives to the requirements, limitations and opportunities presented by the tool you’re looking to market: wow, this is a mouthful. But basically, what it means is that everything needs to be connected and make sense. In our case, we would have loved to do a big contest with lots of prizes et al. But, we had certain requirements and limitations that prevented us from being able to do so. It certainly would have helped with word-of-mouth advertising much sooner and faster but it was not a possibility. So we tried other avenues to achieve the same goals.
6. Be patient: social media doesn’t happen overnight. You need to put the time and effort into it to get results.

If you are interested in seeing some more ideas about how to use social media in support of your overall marketing campaign, feel free to visit my presentation “Framework: Social Media As Part of Your Overall Communication Strategy”.

If you think this case study is as awesome as I do, please cast your vote so Cisco can win the people’s choice award!

Web 2.0 Expo- Ford Motor Company Case Study

The Ford case study was one of the best presentations at the conference. I wish there were more companies sharing their success stories (or failures) of how to actually implement these techniques in an integrated campaign.

The presentation was led by Scott Monty who manages the social media efforts at Ford and Maggie Fox from Social Media Group who is their social media agency of record. I captured my notes and also embedded the slides from the presentation below.

Getting Started

Before jumping into any social conversations they began by doing a SWOT analysis.What they found is not too much different that what I think most people will find. People are talking about them but they weren't leveraging and integrating these people into their communications efforts.

The Revolution

So they decided to change that. They revolutionized the way they interacted with bloggers. It started by inviting bloggers, the people who were already talking to them to a traditional media event. The bloggers were integrated into the process and invited to see and test drive new vehicles.

They continued that relationship online and as Scott puts it, "we wanted to make storytelling easy." They created web-ready content and distributed it through social media press releases.

What's important to note is that this does not replace their traditional media efforts nor is it packaged and distributed in the same way. Their social media releases are not pushed across the wire. Instead it's a pull method of obtaining content, the releases are optimized for search results, uploaded to the Ford website and RSS enabled so that people can subscribe to the content.

Challenges

Scott said that overall there weren't really any challenges. I don't think this will be the same case for every company. What's different at Ford? Alan Mulally, Ford's CEO. The shift to change their communication style was accepted from the top down. There was a little bit of a legal hurdle to get over since they were opening the access to their content including images and videos to anyone. They agreed to put a creative commons restriction meaning people are free to use the content, but they must link back to Ford and they cannot use the content for profit. Also all images and files are for web use only and can't be reprinted.

Results

More people are talking about Ford, they have received 500 posts since September 2007 and the content of the stories is richer and more inline with the corporate positioning. Some enthusiasts are even embedding the social media releases into their sites as a credible source of Ford news. There are 120 videos posted to YouTube which have received over 1.2 million hits.

Lessons Learned

Ford realized that in today's world, 'everyone is a publisher' not just the journalists and that digital content needs to be an integrated way of thinking, not just an afterthought. Also when it came to making this happen what really helped them get this approved and accepted internally was to sit down and explain this big scary thing called 'social media.' After education and understanding people's fears about it, it became a non-issue. People are only afraid of what they don't know so if you explain the mystery it becomes less scary.

What's Next

The Ford Story is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what's next. The initial creation of this site was done in 4-days (over the Thanksgiving Holiday). The future plans for this site are to pull in 3rd party content and become the centralized hub for all Ford content. They also plan to expand beyond auto bloggers to parent blogs, green, tech and finance blogs.

The Deck

Setting Content Free At Ford - Web 2.0 Expo

View more presentations from Scott Monty.

So, have you driven a Ford lately? Admittedly I haven't but all of this social media outreach gave me some warm and fuzzies so I think I may have to take a test drive this weekend

Cisco Ends the Search for the Perfect Valentine's Day Gift

This is a great B2B example of a viral video. This video was posted to YouTube, blogged about and Twittered about and in 5 days has over 8,400 views!

Cisco's Newest Social Media App

Cisco is breaking social media ground yet again with it's new VNI PC Pulse application. I happen to work with one of the masterminds (Thomas Barnett) behind this application so I was able to talk him into an interview to give other social media enthusiasts a back stage view of what went it's creation.

Can you give me a brief description of the new Cisco VNI PC Pulse application?

>> Thomas: Cisco has created a free application to show users how much network bandwidth they consume and the types of applications they use. This application shows users the amount and types of traffic that flow to and from their computer and provides aggregated network usage proof points of all global users of this application for comparison purposes.

This is a great idea, how did you come up with it? What is the benefit to the end user?

>> Thomas: As part of our Visual Networking Index (VNI) initiative, we are interested in activities that can help provide qualitative views of network-based consumer video usage patterns and trends. Cisco has sponsored and will continue to explore consumer preferences and perspectives through surveys/questionnaires (see Cisco VNI Pulse political survey and Initial Cisco VNI Pulse consumer survey). A natural extension of our direct engagement with consumers was to offer a free utility application to develop a deeper understanding of consumer video behaviors and attitudes on a global scale. End users can gain a better understanding of their personal PC use and compare their bandwidth consumption with the aggregate average of others worldwide. They can compare their personal historical bandwidth usage stats (i.e., personal high, personal average, personal low) against WW stats (world high, world average, world low). The application measures LAN and Wi-Fi connections.

What have you learned since the application has been available?

>> Thomas: Data retrieved through the Cisco VNI Pulse application showed that on January 20, 2009 (the day of the U.S. inaugural festivities)individual users downloaded more than twice the amount of data they do during a normal day, at 322 MB vs. a typical average of 159 MB. Doug Webster, a marketing executive with Cisco, speculates that many people had the inaugural festivities streaming in the background while they did other things
Are there any social elements of the application? Thomas' Response: At this point, the ability to compare personal bandwidth usage against world stats is the primary social feature. Users could also compare their usage directly with family, friends and colleagues that choose to use the application. Cisco plans to develop a interactive web page in later in 2009 that will provide additional social networking elements.

What is the main objective of the application and how are you measuring your success?

>> Thomas: By using the Cisco VNI PC Pulse application, consumers will gain a better understanding of their online preferences and needs. The aggregate data will help Cisco build a better understanding of what we all demand from our networks. Data from this application will be shared publicly on a quarterly basis. We will measure our success the number of global users we are able to attract and the quality of new and insightful findings that we are able to share with the telecommunications industry and others interested in IP networking consumer trends.

What future apps can we expect from Cisco?

>> Thomas: We have developed a new mobile application that is currently available for iPhone users and will soon be available for Blackberry users as well. The Cisco Global Internet Speed Test (GIST) for iPhone application is publicly available via the Apple iPhone App Store in iTunes (http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/).

To learn more about the app check out Doug's post 'Are you a Super User?' or of course go directly to the download site and check it out for yourself.

Cisco Social Media Case Study - Free Webcast

In addition to all of the conferences I'm speaking at (as noted in my previous post) I just finished a live webcast that is now available on demand here. Enjoy and feel free to submit questions here on my blog and I will respond to you. I am also welcome to feedback and suggestions for improvement. Thanks!

3M Goes Viral for All the Wrong Reasons

Rather than paying a $2,000 licensing fee for an already viral photo, 3M decided to recreate a fake watered downed version and call it their own. Now, they are going viral but for all the wrong reasons. This is just one of many posts that have and will be written about their faux-pas rather than their savvy marketing. What they should have done is taken notes from Motorola's marketing folks. When Motorola saw the fame and viral effect of the "Backdorm Boys" they didn't try to steal their idea with their own recreation. Instead, they approached them with an offer that resulted in their participation in what ended up being the "most effective use of interactive marketing - new media" at the 2006 Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards.

Next time someone should make sure 3M gets the memo...

Marketing 2.0 with Visual Networking

Visual Networking is yet another web 2.0 marketing tool I’ve added to my virtual briefcase. Visual Networking is a mash-up of digital video and social networking capabilities. The video aspect offers an interactive and engaging way to tell my story while the social networking capabilities allow the viewers to collaborate, comment and share ideas on what they've seen. Here are a few B2B examples I'm aware of, all of which involve creating a persona to demonstrate a point:

Cisco's Disconnected Life Webisode Series - Don and Rhoda Delay's network and communication problems have led them to marriage counseling as they illustrate the 'disconnected life' that I know I couldn't bare. Where's the social networking? Well thanks to YouTube it's in the ability to comment on each of the videos (and keep delivery costs low).



Blue Coat's Bob Kent Stories - Bob Kent represents the bad employee in every company who misuses the Internet at everyone else's expense. The exaggerated stories are ones that anyone in an office environment can relate to. Looking for a way to collaborate? Participate in the monthly contest by submitting your story and you may just get a Nintendo Wii out of it!

Tibco's Greg the Architect - Greg represents the hero that every techy wants to be and no challenge is too small. There's no social networking aspect that I can see so maybe this is just straight video but it's still pretty creative and adding the social component would be easy to do.

Any other examples you think should be added to this list? Feel free to share.

Leveraging Social Media and Web 2.0 in a Product Launch

Part of the reason I've been a lazy blogger lately is that I have been consumed with launching "the most powerful compact router every created" - the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers. It's been a fun launch and we pulled out all of the web 2.0 stops creating a Virual. Viral. Visual. launch. Here's a laundry list of how we leveraged Web 2.0:

• Pre-Launch Uber User Site - We leveraged light hearted videos on this site and posted them on YouTube to maximize visibility.
• Facebook Group - This was part of the pre-launch so I was able write about this one in an earlier post and even shared our process and tips here.
• Interactive 3-D Game - I would like to give kudos to the vendor - Somnio - who helped us create this very cool online game. "EDGE QUEST" offers our audience a fun and engaging way to learn about the product and interact with the Cisco brand - a no-brainer given the playing statistics of online games.
• Social Media Web Widget - Again kudos to Somnio here for the development of Cisco's first web widget that 'lets our content free' by allowing users to embed it on their site (as shown below).



• Social Media Release (SMR) - It's been nearly a year since I stumbled across and wrote about SMRs. What make them different from a traditional release? It's the approach and the fact that a SMR leverages and highlights all of the social aspects of the announcement.
• Second Life Presence - We were able to leverage Second Life pre-launch by hosting a countdown party and post launch by walking through a product demo.
  Other Stuff - We also leveraged sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, Reddit and StumbleUpon - we also have a focused blogger outreach program and a pretty cool looking launch page.

Want to know more about this launch? I'll be presenting on March 26 with Wilson Craig, PR Manager at Cisco for the Silcon Valley American Marketing Association to share processes, best practices and results.

Whole Foods 'CYA' Blog Policy - Don't Do it Or Else...

Back in July Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was caught making inflammatory comments about a potential acquisition target and arguing optimistically for his own company under a pseudonym on a financial message board. He later apologized for his actions and slipped quietly back into corporate obscurity, albeit with a lot of egg on his face.

This wasn’t the first time we’ve seen social networking like forums or blogging get someone in trouble, and you can bet it won’t be the last. The interesting thing to watch here is how these mistakes are handled afterwards. The Whole Foods example is such a good one because we’re able to see exactly what he did, exactly what the public consequences were, and now, exactly how his company is dealing with it.

Whereas most of the attention will continue to be paid to corporate blogging and it’s risks and rewards, not as much attention is given to the fact that the advent of social networking means that all of a company’s employees now have a public identity, and like it or not these people and their opinions will absolutely reflect on the company they work for.

In John Mackey’s case, Whole Foods is following what looks like a pretty vanilla “CYA” plan of protecting themselves from something like this happening again. According to Terrence Russell of Wired, a source close to the matter says, “company executives can no longer post on blogs, message boards, or chat rooms about company matters -- anonymous or otherwise.”

Unfortunately for Whole Foods and other companies following the head in the sand strategy, they’re not only fighting a losing battle but it’s a battle they shouldn’t be fighting anyway. In previous posts I’ve mentioned the wisdom of enabling and educating your employees rather than muzzling them but apparently one lesson in risk was enough to set the table at Whole Foods. As I see it there are two big problems with what they’re doing:

• As customers continue to provide feedback and suggestions online in forums of their own choosing, employees should be empowered to respond and trained to represent the company responsibly.


• As their employees continue to embrace social networking, Whole Foods has just forfeited the voice of their most passionate advocates in the most efficient and effective communications medium in history

These are not easily quantifiable risks, but potential opportunity costs. These problems wouldn’t result in Whole Foods being susceptible to embarrassment and an SEC investigation like Mackey’s faux pas did, but could very well result in them losing touch with their customers, losing market share to competitors and going out of business in a market where razor thin margins are par for the course. It seems like there ought to be some way to mitigate both sets of risks with a well thought out strategy that empowers employees while mitigating risk. Good thing for us companies like Sun are showing us how.

Wal-Mart's Social Media Marketing Transgressions

When it comes to Social Media Marketing there are few failure examples to learn from. Mainly because it's so new but also because many failures get quietly swept under the rug. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, their mistakes are in the limelight but that gives us the opportunity to learn from them. Here are some pitfalls they could have avoided:

False Transparency - They got caught red-handed for staging thier blog (Wal-Marting Across America) leaving their readers feeling cheated and lied to. The couple who was RVing across the US turned out to be a PR stunt.

Build it and They Will Come Mentality - Last summer Wal-Mart built their own social networking site for teens. Did they really think they could compete head-to-head with MySpace? With more than 3% of their traffic coming from MySpace at that time, why not optimize that relationship and go where the community already exists? Doh! After just 10-weeks the site was taken down...

Obsessed with Control

• Their recent Facebook campaign is anything but open and genuine. If you're going to leverage a social media platform like Facebook you have to be willing to open the kimono. Instead they decided to keep a lock down on comments and disabled the forum feature leaving visitors irritated and upset.
  
• They are now threatening their customers from posting Black Friday ad posts. Why would they go to such extremes - they should be rewarding people who want to talk about them - especially since it's not threatening to their business. Reward your customers for having a voice - don't reprimand them.

This realm of Marketing 2.0 is new for all of us and there will certainly be a trial-and-error period but I think these mistakes could have been avoided with a little research and education. I gotta give Wal-Mart credit for not giving up and at least one attempt has worked - reviews and ratings - let's just hope they can handle the negative reviews. It’s clear though that at this point, they’re not getting it. Marketing 2.0 is about enabling conversations and they don’t seem to be interested in that. Quite the opposite in fact. They’re still acting like it’s a different kind of radio.

Conversational Marketing Summit – Day Two

Day two was four days ago now but it took a little longer than expected to catch up from being out of the office for a couple of days. Anyhow, here's my highlights from the summit - day two:

Case Studies: Virgin America & Dove

These were presented at different times of the day but I had an epiphany after the second case study. Although these are clearly B2C case studies I realized the rules of Social Marketing for B2B companies are essentially the same. Here’s how Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly put it:

1. Leaning into the Frame – you need to insert yourself into conversations, no room for wallflowers.
2. Branding Utility – make brands useful in peoples lives, if there’s no point in remember your company name, they won’t.
3. Fundamental Goodness – products you deliver need to be good, people have more reach than ever. They won’t tell 7 people if they’re unhappy, they’ll tell 700.

This is all starting to sound like a broken record. However I was particularly moved by the second point ‘Branding Utility.’ The power of an emotional connection and the ability to make a brand useful in people’s lives is strongly tied to its ability to be social.

Dove in particular has done this very well –it’s not just soap, it’s about real women and real beauty. I was particularly moved by their pro-age (as opposed to anti-age) and self-esteem videos shown below:

The ability to make an emotional connection is no easy feat. Luckily for me Cisco’s Human Network campaign took care of the hard part, now I just need to ensure that connection is communicated in everything we do. Hmmm, can you see me thinking between the lines…

Can Big Brands Change their Approach?

This sessions started with a strong statement from Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter, “Change is about re-staffing the organization.” I’m not sure I think it needs to be this dramatic - I think change within the organization can happen if the right leadership and support exists. Although there will always be nay-sayers, I think “re-staffing the organization” may be a bit dramatic.

Richard Tobaccowala of Denou nails the biggest challenge when he said ‘you need to make today’s numbers but be relevant tomorrow.’

Tina then talks about how Johnson & Johnson acquired the talent they were missing when they purchased BabyCenter. Although they own the site they manage it as a separate un-biased community where they own no more than 15% of voice.

The CMO is being replaced by the CFO

Richard says we need to start self marketing. Marketing as we know (knew) it has become outsourced to customers and the role of the CMO is no longer needed – we need to shift to the CFO ‘Chief Facilitator Officer’ role. When it comes to budget allocation spend more on making what you make better and integrate search into everything you do.

Marketing in Social Networks

I was particularly inspired by JP Morgan Chase and how they leveraged Facebook as the platform to initiate a conversation with its customers. In fact, they created a special credit card to promote solely on Facebook and they gave people a reason to talk to each other by allowing people in the group to come together and pool award points and buy things together. But Own Van Natta warns us that some of these conversations have no end so we need to be prepared to commit for a very long time.

A Social Networking Experiment: Cisco’s Connected Life Contest

Merry Christmas
Ever hear that you should be careful what you ask for because you just might get it? Well, Christmas came early for me this year. I was challenged with applying some of this crazy Marketing 2.0/social networking/new paradigm stuff I’m always talking about to help boost the exposure of a program to promote Cisco’s Connected Life Contest.

The idea behind Cisco’s Connected Life Contest is to generate innovative ideas for a connected life (for example: using your cell phone to pay for your Starbuck's coffee). Cisco is awarding a grand prize of $10,000 for the best idea and ten runner-up prizes of $1,000.

Your Mission, should you choose to accept it . . .
Most of the focus around Marketing 2.0 in my current role is about strengthening ties with current customers. This is a different animal. For this project, I won’t be using Marketing 2.0 techniques to improve the quality of customer conversations but rather to dramatically increase the quantity of conversations we’re having. Whereas most of my marketing focus is on building brand, reinforcing message, and enabling better communication – this is straight up promotion.

What took this from being just another cool marketing project to being a real life Apprentice-style jam session is the lofty objectives, short timelines, and limited resources. We’re working with a very limited budget, a very small (yet obsessively dedicated) team, and 51 days to reach a record setting goal (internal bragging rights only), measured in contest entries.


Ray Hopewood, meet Joe ConnectedLife
We’re relying heavily on social networking to create and sustain buzz for Joe, the central character to the Connected Life Contest. An important early task was to build our online presence for the campaign. “Joe ConnectedLife,” has a profile on Facebook and MySpace, communities on YouTube, Ning and LiveVideo, profiles on 40+ other video sharing sites, and you can tag the Connected Life Contest page with digg or del.icio.us.

Shameless Plug & Cry for Help
In addition to all of the social networking I’m doing to build Joe ConnectedLife’s online presence I’m hoping to inspire my audience to take action. Submit your idea (did I mention there’s a $10,000 Grand Prize!), write about it in your blog, befriend Joe ConnectedLife share the landing page through digg, del.icio.us, or whatever other social bookmarking tool you use – or send me your ideas on what else we can be doing to spread the word.

Marketing 2.0: "The Less We Sell, The More People Want Us"

I thought the first podcast was good but the second one was even better - Marketing 2.0: Creative Destruction of Advertising - Part 2. Again Eric Vidal, advertising and new media leader at WebEx, talks with Chris Peterson, president and CEO of Chautauqua about Marketing 2.0. Here are my highlights:

Eric starts with his sound bite, "Marketing 2.0 is a shift that has dramatic implications on how Marketing get created, distributed, consumed and responded to."

Chris explains that these implications change the process, skill set and deliverables for marketers. For example there is a shift from a single message to many messages, copywriting to editorial writing and print media to innovative custom packages which he explains as "variations of advertorials."

The most valuable part of the podcast to me were the examples they provided:

• WebEx changed their online banner ads to lead with content including white papers, 3rd party content, videos and podcasts. This resulted in more clicks, more interaction - for longer and ultimately more leads. What they learned from this is, "the less we sell, the more people want us."
  
• A family entertainment park in Austin, TX wanted to increate their number of visitors. They created a 2-3 minute documentary about the park and had employees and customers talk about how much fun they have working and being there.The video was then used on their website as well as new content areas on local family entertainment sites. The friendly, open and honest format is really what got more traction.


• Microsoft took a key business white paper on hosted email services and turned it into a Wiki. They then hired a professional technology journalist (with full exposure) and went to IT message boards and blogs and invited people to edit it and ultimately help shape how Microsoft talked about services. Thousands of people came to the site and participated.

Final thoughts were about getting around naysayers and Chris' advice is, "'just do it and beg for forgiveness later." I have to admit that's been working for me!